spec VS wit-bindgen

Compare spec vs wit-bindgen and see what are their differences.

spec

WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite. (by WebAssembly)

wit-bindgen

A language binding generator for WebAssembly interface types (by bytecodealliance)
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spec wit-bindgen
12 27
3,061 877
0.8% 4.6%
8.3 9.4
6 days ago 7 days ago
WebAssembly Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

spec

Posts with mentions or reviews of spec. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-18.
  • WASM Instructions
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    You can parse many things from this file, what are you trying to extract?

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/main/document/core/...

  • The fastest word counter in JavaScript
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2023
    Still strikes me as super sad JS never got SIMD support. It seemed like there were some strong candidate specs. On Node there are some add-on npm libraries that implement.

    My understanding was the main protest was that we would get wasm & some certain implementers said they wanted to focus their energy on wasm.

    That was well over half a decade ago & wasm is still in incredible infancy, with basically only statically linked capabilities in the spec.

    Wasm SIMD proposal itself only merged into wasm in November 2021. https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/pull/1391

    It seems really unfortunate to have decided to keep JS the slow inferior language.

  • Is Blazor server and Blazor Webassembly going to be a big market? I am trying to figure out a niche to go with and I have some asp.net core mvc experience but I am working on a e-commerce .net6 Blazor Webassembly app.
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 19 Dec 2022
    Blazor and WASM itself (outside of dotnet) are relatively new tools and they already show impressive results. They will keep getting better with every release. E.g. this proposal https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/main/proposals/simd/SIMD.md which should bring WASM closer to "near native speed". Blazor already started working on it true.
  • Smolnes: A NES Emulator In
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2022
    Big fan of this author's work.

    They have a Gameboy emulator written in C, which can be compiled to WASM and run in the browser.

    https://github.com/binji/binjgb

    I learned a lot from the code.

    Also I love this project with a bunch of demos in hand-written WebAssembly Text (WAT) format, which is like low-level Lisp that works only with raw memory, numbers, and minimal syntax.

    https://github.com/binji/raw-wasm

    Then I discovered the same author is quite active in the WebAssembly ecosystem, including specs and tooling. Fascinating stuff!

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

  • Exploring WebAssembly, The Underlying Technology Behind Blazor WASM.
    1 project | dev.to | 16 Jul 2022
    [The WebAssembly specification (https://webassembly.github.io/spec/) maintains that the standards apply to more than just the browser host, but also to any other compliant host runtime (what the specification refers to as an embedder).
  • Show HN: We are trying to (finally) get tail-calls into the WebAssembly standard
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2022
    Heya,

    (1) Thank you for implementing this in JSC!! I hope they take it, it makes it into Safari, and the tail-call proposal advances.

    (2) I don't think you are exactly right about the call stack being observable via thrown exceptions. There's no formal spec for the v3 exceptions proposal yet, but in the documents and tests, there's nothing that would change in WebAssembly core to make the call stack observable. It's true that the proposal amends the JS API (but only the JS API) to describe a traceStack=true option; from Wasm's perspective I understand that's just an ordinary exception that happens to include an externref value (just like any other value) to which Wasm itself attaches no special significance. The engine can attach a stack trace if it wants, but there's no requirement (here) about what that stack trace contains or whether some frames might have been optimized out.

    (3) I think the real reason that a Wasm engine can't implicitly make tail calls proper is that the spec tests forbid it, basically because they didn't want the implementation base to split by having some engines perform an optimization that changes the space complexity of a program, which some programs would have started to depend on (the spec tests say: "Implementations are required to have every call consume some abstract resource towards exhausting some abstract finite limit, such that infinitely recursive test cases reliably trap in finite time. This is because otherwise applications could come to depend on it on those implementations and be incompatible with implementations that don't do it (or don't do it under the same circumstances.)" More discussion here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/issues/150

  • WebAssembly 2.0 Working Draft
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2022
  • A challenger to the throne of vector graphics. SVG is dead, long live TinyVG
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2021
  • Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers
    12 projects | /r/programming | 28 Apr 2021
    The WASM paper discusses that in the final section: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2017.pdf
  • Is there a small, well-specified language with lots of example programs?
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 4 Jan 2021
    WebAssembly has a formal specification that includes both operational semantics and natural language-based descriptions of everything in the language. The official repository also has a lot of tests. Besides tests, you should be able to find lots of examples by searching.

wit-bindgen

Posts with mentions or reviews of wit-bindgen. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-15.
  • Wit-Bindgen
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jan 2024
  • WASM by Example
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2023
    The component model is already shipping in Wasmtime, and will be stable for use in Node.js and in browsers via jco (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco) soon. WASI Preview 2 will be done in December or January, giving component model users a stable set of interfaces to use for scheduling, streams, and higher level functionality like stdio, filesystem, sockets, and http on an opt-in basis. You should look at wit-bindgen (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen) to see some of the languages currently supported, and more that will be mature enough to use very soon (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py)

    Right now jco will automatically generate the JS glue code which implements a Component Model runtime on top of the JS engine's existing WebAssembly implementation. So, yes, Components are a composition of Wasm Modules and JS code is handling passing values from one module/instance to another. You still get the performance benefits of running computation in Wasm.

    One day further down the standardization road, we would like to see Web engines ship a native implementation of the Component Model, which might be able to make certain optimizations that the JS implementation cannot. Until then you can consider jco a polyfill for a native implementation, and it still gives you the power to compose isolated programs written in many languages and run them in many different contexts, including the Web.

    (Disclosure: I am co-chair of WASI, Wasmtime maintainer, implemented many parts of WASI/CM)

  • Spin 2.0 – open-source tool for building and running WASM apps
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2023
    Thank you!

    To your point, the primary consideration for choosing the languages is their support for WebAssembly, and WASI in particular.

    Due to Spin's heavy use of WASI and the component model, languages that have first party support in the WIT bindings generator (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen) are the easiest to implement, followed by languages that can be built on top of the support for those with first party support.

    For example, the JavaScript support is built by embedding QuickJS (in particular, Shopify's Javy project — https://github.com/fermyon/spin-js-sdk), which then uses the Rust SDK.

  • Rust + WASM + Typescript [+ React]
    7 projects | /r/rust | 18 Jul 2023
    There are many options, but what worked best for me is compiling with cargo-wasi and loading the resulting Wasm file with browser_wasi_shim. Using wasm32-wasi instead of wasm32-unknown-unknown requires a bit more work (the communication with JS has to be set up manually), but gives the flexibility of having just a Wasm file that can be dropped in and loaded dynamically. (There's wit-bindgen for generating wrapping code according to an interface definition but I didn't have much success with it.)
  • Introducing - Wasmer Runtime 4.0
    3 projects | /r/rust | 22 Jun 2023
    I've been playing with creating a go version of the abi for use with wit-bindgen because the current one uses cgo https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen
  • What in Rust is equivalent to C++ DLLs (shared libraries), or what do I need to do to support extensions in my app?
    7 projects | /r/rust | 21 May 2023
    wit-bindgen - Language Binding Generator for WASM Interface Type
  • Quick tip: Numeromancy, WebAssembly and SingleStoreDB Cloud
    2 projects | dev.to | 24 Feb 2023
    wit-bindgen-rust = { git = "https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen.git", rev = "60e3c5b41e616fee239304d92128e117dd9be0a7" }
  • Using WASM for a plugin system in Rust? (generate code at runtime and then hot reloading it as a library)
    6 projects | /r/rust | 22 Feb 2023
    Yep, you're right. For this, there are a few options. The ones most relevant to you are fp-bindgen, which targets Wasmer, and wit-bindgen, which targets wasmtime.
  • Introducing Ambient 0.1: a runtime for building high-performance multiplayer games and 3D applications, powered by Rust, WebAssembly and WebGPU
    8 projects | /r/rust | 22 Feb 2023
    Are you evaluating if WebAssembly Component Model, its WIT format and related tooling like wit-bindgen could be a good fit for your multiple languages support?
  • Using SingleStoreDB, WebAssembly and GraphQL
    2 projects | dev.to | 15 Feb 2023
    [package] name = "sentiment" version = "0.1.0" edition = "2021" # See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html [dependencies] wit-bindgen-rust = { git = "https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen.git", rev = "60e3c5b41e616fee239304d92128e117dd9be0a7" } vader_sentiment = { git = "https://github.com/ckw017/vader-sentiment-rust" } lazy_static = "1.4.0" [lib] crate-type = ["cdylib"]

What are some alternatives?

When comparing spec and wit-bindgen you can also consider the following projects:

uwm-masters-thesis - My thesis for my Master's in Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

lunatic - Lunatic is an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly

Oberon - Oberon parser, code model & browser, compiler and IDE with debugger

spin - Spin is the open source developer tool for building and running serverless applications powered by WebAssembly.

meetings - WebAssembly meetings (VC or in-person), agendas, and notes

kwasm - Proof of concept React-ish UI library, powered by WebAssembly

component-model - Repository for design and specification of the Component Model

webassembly-tour - ⚙️ Take you through a tour of WebAssembly (WASM targets on WASI) with wasmCloud, Krustlet, WAGI, etc. 🌟 Give it a star if you like it.

proposals - Tracking WebAssembly proposals

wasi-experimental-http - Experimental outbound HTTP support for WebAssembly and WASI

ecma262 - Status, process, and documents for ECMA-262